Enough
by snuggalong
Summary: Leonard is twelve the first time someone dies under his hands. He makes a child's promise to himself in that moment - it won't happen again. Not on his watch. It will, inevitably - but less often than most. ""'Til Universe's end," he whispers, and it feels less like an ending, and more like a beginning." [bones drabbles in the #wizard trek 'verse, cross-posted from tumblr]
1. One

**Enough**

* * *

Leonard is twelve the first time someone dies under his hands. Granted, that someone is a horse, named Lola, that was old to begin with when she leapt the fence as he and his father tried to get the horses inside during a thunderstorm and bolted into the forest.

They find her the next day at the bottom of a small ravine, both front legs broken, chest heaving and whickering softly in pain. His father leaves him with her while he goes to get his shotgun. Leonard gets down on his knees in the mud next to Lola, sliding close, rests one hand on her side and runs the other through her mane and tries not to look at the twisted angle of her legs.

Lola dies just as his father comes back, her last breath leaving her in something reminiscent of a sigh. He sighs as well and leaves again—this time to call a few friends who will be able to help them get her out of the bottom of the ravine. Leonard stays where he is, feeling her muscles go rigid and the warmth leave her skin.

Even at this age, he is well and determined to be a doctor. This is the first time someone dies under his hands, and regardless of the fact that there's nothing he could have done, he makes a child's promise to himself in that moment—it won't happen again. Not on his watch.

It will, inevitably, but less often than most, because the next day Ashton from the local antique store will call and tell him that someone brought in another box of books, _medical_ textbooks, and they're his if he wants them because there's no way Ashton will be able to sell them. He'll go and he'll fall in _love_, with these thick books with the words he scarcely understands but wants to more than anything, and the old ink drawings, all the knowledge perhaps slightly outdated but it's a _start_, and he'll lug the box home and spend hours poring over each and every one until he reaches the bottom and finds one not like the rest, a little book bound in buckham with well-thumbed pages and written mostly in a language he doesn't know, some strange trailing script that looks vaguely like old Arabic.

Except there will be pages he can read, near the front, pages in English that speak of Powers and Choices and an eternity-long Battle and _magic_ and he thinks it's a joke, a children's book that whomever brought in the medical textbooks either didn't realize made its way into the box or just decided to pack in with the rest, but he finds he can't stop reading because this magic, this _wizardry_, he _wants_ it to be real, more than a_nything, _because it's offering him everything he's ever fiercely wished for—offering him what he begged for as Lola lay dying in front of him the day before. The ability to fix, to heal, to save, to be _enough, _only on a level grander than he's ever imagined.

_(Starfleet is scarcely out of the galaxy and here this book is talking about Andromeda like they're our next-door neighbors—)_

It's heady, it's breathtaking, it's almost too good to be true—but then he turns a page and finds a single block of plain-type text, fantastical in its utter ordinariness.

It's not too unlike the Hippocratic Oath. An Oath to first and foremost, do no harm.

An Oath to protect everything that lives and grows, in the name of Life itself—to protect the whole Universe from its inevitable ending—he can think of no higher calling.

Oh, it terrifies him, too. He's twelve, and here is an Oath—and he knows oaths are serious things, but something tells him there is none more serious than this—and it's telling him that he must forsake fear for courage, death for life—a twelve year old hardly thinks of dying, let alone laying down their lives for others.

But then he thinks of Lola, again, of the feeling of her struggling for breath, of the pained, resigned glaze in her eyes, of people dying the world over, the galaxy over, for stupid reasons every day, and he thinks, this is the chance to change that.

If it's real. Which he's becoming less and less certain it's not.

_Where's the harm?_

The worst that can happen is nothing. The best that can happen is…everything.

In the violet dusk of a Georgia summer evening, Leonard McCoy leans close, breathing in the scent of pages that something tells him have seen more than their appearance belies, and reads the words of the first oath he'll take in his life—but not the last—scarcely noticing as the dusk and the fading sunlight lean close and the chirping of the crickets and the rustle of the wind fades away and the words he speaks echo more than is feasible off the old oak panels of his bedroom.

"'_Til Universe's end,"_ he whispers, and it feels less like an ending, and more like a beginning.

(Two days later, he'll nearly fall off the fence he's fixing—or half-fixing, because his manual is propped against a post beside him—in surprise when a young foal wanders over and whickers, clear as day, "Where's Lola?")

(Three weeks later, he'll face down the Lone Power, the Kindler of Wildfires, in his own guise when a blaze of fire not of this Earth, or any planet known, threatens to destroy the forest—an Old Forest, of power beyond measure—and half the state along with it. He wins, narrowly, and the fact that he nearly turned his back on his Oath, nearly turned tail in the face of Death himself, doesn't matter, because he didn't, because he saved what he would never have been able to save before, and that's all he's ever wanted.)

(Twelve years later, after more assignments than he can count and more failures than he'd like to admit, because no one is perfect, he will order everyone out of the room of a young woman who is sure to die within the hour if nothing is done, and he will hold the breath in her body with sheer force of will as his magic knits bone and muscle and skin just enough for her to live, should she desire it. And he knows she does. Even if she doesn't yet know about the small knot of light low in her belly, her heart does, and as he collapses into a chair, chest heaving, the gash across his palm healing, he can hear it in his ears as the wizardry fades, beating strong and true and he smiles because he can't fix everything, can't save everyone,

-a truth he'll soon enough find applies even to himself—

But in moments like this, he feels like he could, and it's enough.)

* * *

The _Young Wizards_ fandom on tumblr delved into a thing recently - the WizardTrek 'verse. Check out #wizard trek or #wizardtrek there if you would like to see what other works people have written thus far :)


	2. Two

**Enough**

* * *

Like the death of the universe, it's slow in coming and despite his best attempts, McCoy realizes, inevitable.

Perhaps if he'd told the truth from the start, they wouldn't have gotten here. Regardless, he didn't, and even as he works himself to the bone at the hospital and on errantry, doing what he's always done—fixing, healing, saving—he remains ignorant of the deep cracks and faults slowly forming in his and Jocelyn's relationship.

It comes to a head one evening, a quiet evening that he's on call but nothing's come and they're sitting together on the couch and his arm is around her shoulder and if he were there he might realize how tense she was, how distant she'd been all evening—for weeks now, really—but he's not, his mind is elsewhere, it's always elsewhere, and she knows, and finally she pulls away and he looks at her and something in her face stops him cold and in a split second of intuition he knows what is coming.

"Leonard—" she says, and he tries to stop the inevitable, "Joc—"

"—I want a divorce."

Hearing the words stops him cold again. His mouth works and then shuts, and he just looks at her, again, and dimly he realizes that perhaps he should have seen this coming months ago. Finally, he manages to speak.

"Joc, I—please—"

"Leonard…don't. Your work comes first, it's _always_ come first and I think I knew that and thought I could deal with it, but…I can't. Not anymore. Did you even _remember _that our anniversary is this Sunday?"

It's a low blow, a knife straight to his heart, because the answer is no, he hadn't, and he doesn't say anything but Jocelyn can see it in his face, and she sighs. "I think you'll be happier, in the long run," she says and he wants to protest, tries to protest, but thinks better of it and instead asks, "But will you?"

She's quiet again. "I loved you," she says, finally. "I still do. But there comes a time when loving someone means letting them go. …you can't say this comes as a surprise."

And she's right. As much as he wants to, as much as he wants to deny it, as he looks back, he can't. All those late night calls, the errantries that kept him away for days, sometimes weeks—it's a wonder it didn't come sooner.

"…what about Joanna?"

She doesn't say anything, but the answer is in her face, and his chest tightens, and silently he tells her go on, dares her to say it.

"I'm going to sue for full custody," she says at last. "But you'll have visitation rights."

There it is. And he wants to yell, to say _Bullshit, she's my daughter too_, except when was the last time he was her father? When was the last time he tucked her in and kissed her goodnight, when was the last time he sat and helped her build dough castles and then turn them into cookies, when was the last time he took her to the park, when was the last time he knew who her friends were or what she liked or what she didn't like, when was the last time he told her he _loved her—_God, when was the last time he was there for her at all in any meaningful way?

He doesn't remember, and that sickens him down to his core, and he knows Jocelyn can see it. "Jocelyn, I—"

Later he won't be able to explain why, why he did what he did at that precise moment, except desperation.

"There's something I have to tell you."

So he tells her. He's been trying to, been meaning to, for years, but it was never the right time and neither is now, really, but still it comes spilling out, everything, and she doesn't understand, doesn't believe him, thinks he's crazy, he can see it in her eyes, and so he throws caution to the wind and he shows her, takes the spell he's had sitting in his notes for ages, waiting for that right time, and he takes her to Titan to watch the Jupiter's Red Spot roil and writhe and move from scarcely a stone's throw away. The stars are fire in the velvet sky and Jupiter is mammoth on the horizon and no wind sings here, only silence, and in spite of himself he smiles because it's been too long and it's still as exhilarating as the first time and she sees and though he doesn't feel it quite yet, something fractures then.

He can't keep them there for long—it's been a long time since he was at the height of his power—but as they reappear in their living room he thinks now, now she'll understand, now she see why I'm the way I am, and oh, she does.

She understands that she and Joanna will never be first, or even second, for him.

She shakes her head and goes to bed and leaves him standing in the dark, and in the morning when he wakes up after fitfully dozing on the sofa for the night she's making breakfast for her and Joanna and there are three suitcases by the door.

He should be fighting this, doing something, doing _anything_, but all he can do is stand there and come to the slow-creeping realization that they are past fixing, past healing, past saving, and have been for a while now.

He hugs Jocelyn stiffly, kisses her cheek, but then he kneels to hug Joanna who thinks they're just going to visit Grandma and Grandpa for a while and finds himself holding her tight, his face pressed into her hair, and he's more present than he's been in months. She's warm and her hair smells like strawberries and he can feel her heartbeat and _God, _how could anything—how could he let anything become more important than this?

"I love you, JoJo," he murmurs, and he has never meant anything more. She giggles and kisses his cheek, sloppy and wet. "I love you too, daddy," she says, and then leans in as conspiratorially as a child can. "More'n chocolate, even!" and his chest tightens even as he forces out a laugh and tells her he's honored to be held in such high esteem and ruffles her hair and tells her to be good.

Then they're gone, and he's alone. The house is silent, empty, and he wanders aimlessly into the living room, only to spot his manual sitting where he left it on the coffee table.

A wordless noise of frustration and grief breaks out of him and in two strides it's in his hands and with another he's thrown it as hard as he can against the wall. It mocks him as it falls to the floor, undamaged, and he makes the same noise, softer now, more grief than frustration, as he sinks onto the sofa and buries his face in his hands and wonders what's the point of being a doctor, of being a wizard, if you can't fix the things that matter.

* * *

There is a third installment of this in the works, but right now my to-write list is so long it isn't even funny. Still, hope this one was enjoyable.


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